Hmm, so Google+ eh? Well it's ok. Seems fine, does the job. But, it would though wouldn't it. Chinese knockoffs of iPods are FINE, they work, some are even nearly as good, but that doesn't mean they should exist.
Here's my main gripe. You have a successful product, you want your own successful product which does a similar thing. You copy said product. This bit is fine, without 'inspiration' nothing would progress, we'd literally be inventing the wheel everytime. The bit that's annoying is when you copy EVEN THE BAD BITS. I can just hear the execs insisting that every aspect be copied, just in case. The difference between success and failure on paper is so small that people get paranoid. Case in point is the comments in the + stream. Why on earth would you copy Facebooks when we've had better comment systems in play for DECADES?
No replying to replies. Facebooks comments encourage pithy 'conversations' since it's not possible to follow a few streams involving multiple people. The annoying thing is Google already do better comments in nearly all their other products. Yes, I know people will argue that complexity was what made Google Wave fail. IT DIDN'T. The implementation of that complexity is the trick. Having a structured, tabbed comment section would allow actual social interaction and conversations to occur, realtime. No Huddle required. People understand this, it's not 'weird'. The very first few posts I viewed had people constantly asking 'how do I reply to people?', an actual Google rep answered 'you don't. You can +1 them though'. REALLY?
Now onto Wave. I swear this is relevant.. Ok, as a product Wave is shit. I use it all the time, but it's shit, I admit it. No-one seems to mention WHY it's shit though. Google's Wave CLIENT, the interface to the Wave engine, is terrible. Really bad, I could go on (for many pages), but I won't. Why they ever associated the two together I'll never know. Here's how I see it, it's the ultimate car, it does everything, but the wheels are square.. FIX THE WHEELS. Don't declare that "cars don't work, people didn't accept the idea of cars, they didn't know what to do with it, therefore we've decided to go back to making scooters and never again mention this car joke again". Moving? HAHA I Can move on my feet, what a waste of time, LMAO etc.
So what am I getting at? Google reinventing everything everytime is what I'm getting at. Wave failed because it wasn't used in a needed or wanted niche. Hell, people don't even know what they want until you show them.. slowly. It was the backend of a killer app that didn't actually exist. Sure techie people still use the hell out of it, but unless you can attract the 14 year old market it's doomed. So why didn't Google use the Wave technology in Buzz? In GMail? In Google groups? and especially, in Google+? It was done, it worked, everything had been thought out and perfected. It worked brilliantly and now we're back at scooters..
Stick Wave tech in the structure of Google+ somehow. Convert the existing comments across to wave, or if you must, add another seperate section like Huddle and it'll be a massive hit. Genuinely better than FriendFace, or FaceOff or whatever that thing is. Imagine a stream and decent comment section with live updating? Genuine realtime interaction and it'd be fun. That alone would be totally worth moving the comments to a Wave engine and the beauty is no-one would even know it was Wave. Then gradually Google could release a new gadget every now and then, similar to the really cool live inline gadgets from wave. Enable them to be added into the main stream, like little games, interactive maps, todo lists etc, all that cool Wave stuff that people loved. I understand why Wave failed, it gave you everything all at once, but was awkward in the extreme to manage. This is why people are raving about Huddle, Sparks etc etc, even though each is nothing compared to what Wave could do, they are easy to try, easy to understand, easy to FIND (Wave client was a pain like that). People need to get used to new things, much like a kid getting 100 presents at Christmas, they just don't or couldn't appreciate them all. But fish them out and they love it.
Please bring back Google Wave in Google+. Restrict it, hide it, whatever, just don't reinvent the square wheel when we should be moving on.
